Back to your youth ....

[3 Colours Red]

Back to your youth ....

Rory McIntyre had just come back to school after a few weeks off for an initially undisclosed reason. He was still excused PE - however in kickabouts we stuck him in goal.

Turns out he had a fractured skull that hadn't fully healed yet. There's a Petr Cech joke in there somewhere but it would need an even sicker mind than mine to come up with it.

[beak]

Back to your youth ....

Anorak Smith wrote: Beak, is that a life-size picture of your miniscule ball? We could really do with something to give your ball some scale.

There were two kinds: one the size of a grapefruit (reasonably shit), another the size of a mandarin (completely shit).

We didn't have the 4 stotts rule, but a keeper could call 2 b's, meaning their clearance had to be allowed to bounce twice before anyone started interfering with it. The rule was kept so well, I can't remember what punishment one would receive for breaking it.

I do remember that the punishment for being a keeper who lost a game of heads-and-volleys or ten-and-you're-dead was, though. You'd get bullets: forced to stand on the goal-line, nose to the wall, with every outfield player getting one chance to shoot from the (improvised) penalty spot, aiming either at the arse (if they were kind) or back of the head (if they were cruel).

[Uncle Ethan]

Back to your youth ....

Rush goalies, no goal-hanging, last goal wins, headers and volleys S.P.O.T

And the the village rec games on summer evenings never let Mike Whitney kick you. His steel toe caps leave a scar.

[My Name Is Ian]

Back to your youth ....

gerontophile wrote: I got presented my medals when I was 8 years old, by a sparkling Stevie Chalmers (obviously skint, no idea why he was there).

There is a picture somewhere with me sat on his knee.

I was thinking 'who is this old person?' and he is thinking 'why has this child just pissed on my knee, when I could be elsewhere talking about Lisbon?'

Bobby Lennox was unavailable. Generally.

There is an infamous picture of my father, running across the Wembley turf in 1967. The story behind that is even funnier.

I am still not allowed to tell it. But, I have a bar of Cadbury's finest, and... hey everyone's dead.

Haaaaaaang on there, cowboy. Did you piss on Stevie Chalmers' knee, or what it somebody else? Because that may be the greatest tenuous claim to fame that I've ever heard.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Back to your youth ....

Beak, is that a life-size picture of your miniscule ball? We could really do with something to give your ball some scale.

There's a shadow of a TIE fighter right underneath it.

[Nurse Duckett]

Back to your youth ....

Uncle Ethan wrote: And the village rec games on summer evenings never let Mike Whitney kick you. His steel toe caps leave a scar.

Ha! That's how John "Bonjo" Hill broke my leg on our village rec - he was in goal wearing Doc Martens (and a Levi denim jacket as I recall, it wasn't exactly full kit), narrowed the angle as I was about to score, and kicked my shin instead of the ball. Forty years ago last month, that was.

[G-Man]

Back to your youth ....

Footballs and tennis balls were also banned in our school. So we played with flattened coke cans across the asphalted schoolyard. I'd love to claim that playing with flattened coke cans honed our technical skills in the way whatever they use on the Copacabana beach improves the skills of Brazilian players. Alas...

One rule we had was that you could forgo taking a corner on the rule that three (untaken) corners equal one penalty.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Back to your youth ....

HORN wrote: Orange Wembley Trophy footballs were the stock choice in the early seventies. We'd assemble on the school playing field most weekday evenings in the summer term to discover either no one had brought a ball or we had 8 or 9 of them.

This was our existence too, living next to a (in fact our own) school. And usually weekends too. The Sunday afternoon game continued til we were 18 or 19, and only stopped when some started playing Sunday league.

I live near the same school now and it's all high security fencing and paranoia, the field is still there but the local kids are terrified to use it - can't help but feel it's a backward step.

I was a governor there a few years ago and the fellow governors were outraged that local kids were not only playing cricket on the field in the summer holidays, but had lifted a manual mower over the fence to mow out a wicket - I thought they should have been given medals.

[johnr]

Back to your youth ....

G-Man wrote: Footballs and tennis balls were also banned in our school. So we played with flattened coke cans across the asphalted schoolyard. I'd love to claim that playing with flattened coke cans honed our technical skills in the way whatever they use on the Copacabana beach improves the skills of Brazilian players. Alas...

When I was in the penultimate year of my primary school - who hadn't ever won the Newham cup or league (finishing bottom the previous 3 years) - they banned footballs, and we were only allowed tennis balls. That was also the year my dad offered to come in at lunchtimes and try and run some training. In my final year we won the league and cup. Not sure what was the most important of the two factors.

[imp]

Back to your youth ....

I remember reading an interview with Trevor Brooking when I was a kid, saying that when he was a school boy he passed a tennis ball to himself off the walls of the houses all the way to school and back, every day - and that's what made him the player he is today etc.. I tried it too in my back yard, but when you have an actual ball sitting there it's very difficult to get any joy out of playing with a tennis ball. I think I lasted about ten minutes before I gave up.

[Duncan Gardner]

Back to your youth ....

imp wrote: I remember reading an interview with Trevor Brooking when I was a kid, saying that when he was a school boy he passed a tennis ball to himself off the walls of the houses all the way to school and back, every day - and that's what made him the player he is today etc.

George Best said the same thing- kids in the 1950s must have been pretty anti-social.

Admittedly, Best had to cross town to his school and probably needed that single-minded dedication to avoid being beaten up by kids from NI's less educationally-advantaged community.

Grosvenor Grammar School recognised the problem and moved to a more suburban site near Best's home. But by then he'd already been expelled (for truancy, aged 12).

[ad hoc]

Back to your youth ....

Tennis balls? Luxury.

They were even banned at our school and we had to use "stocking balls" which were basically made of a scrunched up newspaper pages, stuffed inside a stocking (or tights, because no-ones mums ever wore stockings), which was then twisted and the put back the other way (if you see what I mean) over and over until you had this largish ball which could never ever break a window and/or someone's glasses. But was pretty unpleasant when it was wet and muddy. You would have a tennis ball sized stocking ball for the ball-based tag games ("kingy" was the name of ours), and much larger for football.

[Sits]

Back to your youth ....

"Kingy" - yes. With a tennis ball. Stung like hell.

At senior school ( a rugby school) we played football at lunchtime with tennis balls. There were four concrete tennis courts in a row, and always four games on. And in the far corner, the small huddle with a blue fog above them, ho would scatter if a teacher arrived at the other end of the courts. If there weren't enough for match, we played "three-and-in".

In the summer holidays we would play "jumpers for goalposts" on the playing fields between Pinkneys Green and Maidenhead Thicket. No pitch markings, no wings. So you were restricted in field length by the "goals" but not on width. I wasn't very good, but small and quick so would run way, way out wide, away from the game, until everyone gave up chasing me. Then, attempt to build up enough momentum to find a way through to goal. Never worked.

Opposing numbers depended entirely on who turned up; my mate Graham who didn't like football went in goal. The games would go on until after 10pm, the point when we couldn't see the ball, each other, the goals or the dog turds due to darkness.

[1974ddr]

Back to your youth ....

beak wrote:

I do remember that the punishment for being a keeper who lost a game of heads-and-volleys or ten-and-you're-dead was, though. You'd get bullets: forced to stand on the goal-line, nose to the wall, with every outfield player getting one chance to shoot from the (improvised) penalty spot, aiming either at the arse (if they were kind) or back of the head (if they were cruel).

For some reason, 'headers and volleys' was called 'Germans' down our end. I didn't know why then, and still don't, so if anyone can enlighten me...

[treibeis]

Back to your youth ....

For some reason, 'headers and volleys' was called 'Germans' down our end. I didn't know why then, and still don't, so if anyone can enlighten me...

I don't know which country you grew up in but, going by your age, I reckon it had something to do with Gerd Müller's and Uwe Seeler's goals during the 1970 World Cup.

[Gerontophile]

Back to your youth ....

Ian, fairly sure it was me.

Just tried to explain that story to someone else. Someone else as in, no idea what football is.

It was definitely Stevie Chalmers.

[gavc23]

Back to your youth ....

Does anyone remember Spangles etc

To continue, our primary school's playground usually had the big kids' game going from one end to the other. But simultaneously up to 3 smaller games going across the same space. The rule was usually that the big kids could collect any ball that was in play and temporarily join the game it belonged to, or on rarer occasions, try to play their own game with this second ball.

I do remember Ben tripping over a kindergarten child whilst chasing a ball at full speed and flipping over a bit like Donald Campbell.

[Jah Womble]

Back to your youth ....

To continue, our primary school's playground usually had the big kids' game going from one end to the other. But simultaneously up to 3 smaller games going across the same space. The rule was usually that the big kids could collect any ball that was in play and temporarily join the game it belonged to, or on rarer occasions, try to play their own game with this second ball.

At my school, the newly-designated football quad was only really big enough for one game, and 'first on' wasn't necessarily an advantage - school hierarchy would inevitably kick in. In the 5th year, we could usually guarantee the juniors disappearing once we were there. Similarly, I can recall the 6th years showing up and having a kickabout right across our games. If we were lucky, they'd take on a selection of us - otherwise, it was goodnight and find somewhere else.